Now this is going to be fun! It truly does feel great to realize we all are one. So we shall meditate. This meditation’s rhyming verse describes a paradigm of us inside this universe, adrift in space and time. It’s nice that we can simply start by recognizing how a check of every body part can help us be here now. We feel our bellies and our heads and just become aware how arms and hands and feet and legs are feeling everywhere. Between and through them circulate our blood-streams to refresh the oxygen that activates awareness in our flesh. And as we slowly breathe we find that doing so can draw us into a more present mind to feel the moment raw. With every breath we take and leave, we clear our inner eyes and fully, lucidly perceive each second passing by. Our mindful meditative selves grow out of living meat and help our bodies stay in health by finding what we need. So let’s do that now. Let’s explore and see what’s to be found. Outside our bodies, there is more. Let’s take a look around! Unless we’re blind we’re free to see, unless we’re deaf, to hear and realize we’re utterly surrounded by what’s here. This place surrounding us here now where we consider this, is just as present, anyhow, as our breathing is. Our breaths connect within the air, within the atmosphere. The envelope of sky we share is also part of here. We also share what rests beneath: Our bodies’ place of birth from which came all who now here breathe as children of the Earth. Of course there’s more than senses show around us near and far. The sky above, the Earth below; there’s more to where we are. To North and South, to West and East, the world goes on and on, the planet every plant and beast and we now breathe upon. Of all the Earth, we barely know the surface we begrime, upon the spinning rock below, adrift in space and time. Our calm and meditating minds can feel this easily. Imagination goes behind all things our eyes can see. To find, as further out we go, whichever way we face, to left, to right, above, below, the solar system. Space. It’s blacker than the night of course and bigger than the sky and it is hard to see because it was not made for eyes. It effortlessly overwhelms imagination. Still and everywhere around this realm extends and always will. Around us all and everyone we’ve met or ever can, extends the system of the Sun that dwarfs all realms of man. Out there, all human joy and strife and knowledge matter not. Out there, this fragile ball of life is just a pale blue dot. And there are other, bigger dots and countless asteroids. This Earth is one among a lot around us in the void. Yet all of them combined appear like specks of dust compared to one enormous blazing sphere, the center that they share. A thousand times as ponderous as all that circles it, it radiates splendiferous and indiscriminate. It weighs three-hundred-thirty-three times thousand times as much as Earth, which seems like mere debris, a tiny circling smudge. There’s hydrogen inside the Sun that lets it shine so bright by burning up: Four million tons per second fuse to light. This fusion forges helium and other specks of dust that constitute the medium from which grows life like us. But near the Sun, its gamma rays and heat do not allow life smart enough to be amazed at what is true here now. And further out, it stays too cold for molecules to toy with games of entropy that mold the life that we enjoy. While outermost, in blackest night, drift frozen rocks so far, to them our splendid sphere of light looks like another star. We’re lucky Earth is temperate or life could not have spawned. This planet would stay desolate and all of us unborn. As fully as we do depend on Earth that we live on, we also clearly understand we’re children of the Sun. And yet the Sun, though all must spin around it, merely is a rare domain of light within a yawning black abyss. In outer space surrounding us lie distances too great for us to easily discuss or even contemplate. For space is mostly nothingness around us everywhere, the freezing dark is limitless in empty space out there. Of course there is some gravity that massive things impart and maybe some dark energy that pushes them apart. But nothing’s there to hear or see or smell or taste or touch and trying to imagine, we can think of nothing much. And still we feel, for what that’s worth, beyond the seen and near the vastness outside planet Earth that’s real now and here. In meditation, we somehow expand our minds to try to feel the system we are now and here surrounded by. The moons and planets we can see, as far as we have found, are lifeless. Earth now seems to be the only game in town. Yet all these places we could go and cultivate and fill, are merely specks in what we know remains much bigger still. The stars, these many tiny lights, each are a blazing sun and circling them, caught in their might, are planets being spun. Yet humans cannot see that far. The pixels of our eyes are just too few, which is why stars look like they’re equal-sized. Through telescopes, we understood. The stars all shine so bright that only monstrous distance could dilute them into night. These distances define the space that all stars occupy and make a single, real place that we’re surrounded by. The stars that shine all night and day within or out of sight are what our home, the Milky Way, appears like from inside. Our Milky Way contains at least one hundred billion suns. Through gravity, they all are pieced together into one. Around this place, where we now feel what we are breathing in, these suns form one tremendous wheel with one tremendous spin. And all these suns are shining clear, enormous and sublime. They all are real here where we’re adrift in space and time. Unmoved by beings such as we on Earth, our small enclave, the stars around us now will be the stars around our graves. Except for those which have gone through their hydrogen supply and end as all things someday do, for even stars must die. And some, much bigger than our Sun, burn brighter still and must explode one day, when they are done with making light and dust. These supernovas, as we call them, burst stupendously. Some can outshine the sum of all stars in the galaxy. With their magnetic fields unfurled, their yields annihilate or sterilize abundant worlds that life might populate. Yet all we breathe and eat and drink comes from these massive bombs. We’re supernova-dust that thinks about where it came from. And since the stars have made the clay that led to our birth, we’re children of the Milky Way, as are the Sun and Earth. But supernovas are quite rare. Three times per century does one of them explode somewhere within our galaxy. Yet many supernovas do each second detonate in all the galaxies whereto we now shall escalate! A million times much further out than all the Milky Way, more galaxies are shining proud around us here today. These galaxies, each huge and wide, much like the one we’re in, outnumber all the stars inside our home and origin. Around where we consider this, whichever way we face, drift billions of these galaxies right now, right here, in space. We realize with utter awe and know beyond all doubt: Beyond this world are trillions more that we could learn about. And almost all of them must be absurdly far away in ultimate reality beyond the Milky Way. From here where our bodies stay, imagination climbs through further outer Milky Ways adrift in space and time. And through the emptiness between in almost all of space, where not a single star is seen in almost every place. And meditation does allow our minds to feel it all. To feel the Universe that now surrounds us as a whole. Despite all suns that intersperse this dark continuum, most places in this Universe are total vacuum. And therefore, atoms are quite rare. Yet trillions of them have condensed into the flesh we wear that draws this very breath. Two thirds of atoms in us are still hydrogen which sprang into existence not in stars but back in the Big Bang. For all the time since time began, as entropy made space, each travelled an enormous span to meet here face to face. Through vacuum and solar flame, they found their way somehow. And we as that which they became, thus came to meet here now. Through all we breathe and drink and eat, they travel and endow with nutrients the living meat in which we meet here now. The atoms that we are traverse all space and time, which means we’re children of the Universe and we have always been. The atoms in us met before and they will meet again, compelled by universal law out in the there and then. One endless cosmic maelstrom, age-old and ever new, is where we all are coming from and where we’re going to. The knowledge we are made of dust compels us to admit the Universe is in us just as we are within it. From here we may arise to see and claim as our own the secrets of reality just waiting to be known. And so we know the infinite is absolutely real. It’s here, it’s now, it’s intimate, this vastness that we feel. Whatever else is true for us, we’ll always know this rhyme. We’ll always know we’re made of dust adrift in space and time.

Had I had any chance at all, I'd feel remorse now, yet Since it has never been my call, there's nothing to regret.

The four reactions to a threat were glad to have a chat. "I'm Fight because I'm very strong!" "I'm Fawn. I guess that's wrong..." "I'm Flight. When it's not fun, I go." "I'm Freeze, I take it slow."

Yes there is cooperation in many species including plants. I don't think all of those are love in the "aesthetic" sense @plinz mentioned. Animals we domesticated to be like us, especially dogs, and very young animals, have it. But as adult members of a predatory species that self-domesticated, we're quite unique.

@civic_cat @Plinz Competition and coercion is chimp-level ethics. But I think it's an open question whether love is optimal specifically for humans, or from our level on up.

@civic_cat @Plinz Feelings aside, nobody can deny that we evolved to love, because we had evolved to recognize whether we could trust each other, because we had to learn to collaborate when we were already a somewhat intelligent primate species, because collaboration was how we could defeat lions.

Met @robinhanson in a dream. Talked shared in cults and creeds. I thought I had a clever scheme, but Robin disagreed.

@DefenderOfBasic Namaste.

@nosilverv Sounds like Grok.

@VividVoid_ The feeling of integrity is when you hold more dear the foes who fight you honestly than friends who're insincere.

@Thomasdelvasto_ @altechist Not in agreement with Psalm 8:6?

@RYChappell @Aella_Girl I think there just is more of a market for hyperbole and oversimplification than there is for honesty.

An insight that I like to bother my friends with, to ring bells, is thoughts seem thought-like to each other and self-like to themselves.

@TylerAlterman Is your Normal Buddhist into Zen, Vajrayana, Theravada, or any of the other schools that are all outgroup to each other? Or do you see Buddhism at such low resolution that those all seem to blend into each other, like most Buddhists do?

@Laserfish2 @ESYudkowsky Nuclear reactors are safe because none of the early ones were exponential enough to stop us from trying again.

@akirathedon We didn't start the firings They were always needed, budgets were exceeded We didn't start the firings Now the bold reforms come, voters voted for them

@RatOrthodox We know for a fact mystical experiences can come from mundane causes such as drugs and epilepsy. Here's my longread. Not sure about banger tweets, I'm not an expert on those.

@Thomasdelvasto_ I'm both. Not sure it applies in general.

@robinhanson I would guess European countries exporting to each other counts, but US states moving goods and payments between each other doesn't?

@ChansonEtoiles @Thomasdelvasto_ You can direct metta at anything you can think of, even at cartoon characters... you can actually just try that... and even at thoughts of self. Nobody doubts such thoughts exist! Buddhists say they lack veracity. Cartoon characters lack veracity too, doesn't stop the metta.

@Thomasdelvasto_ You already did. Frankincense is a (very weak, cannabis-like) psychedelic. I think I told you this before. Orthodoxy is one of the denominations (with Catholicism) that uses it most, by the way.